What are the keywords of advice you would share with anyone who needs to accelerate the introduction, adoption, and profitability of digital content and products globally in 2018? While I have been asked this question several times for the last couple of months, my answer has been very similar regardless of industry and background. Think about investing in meeting the level of authenticity and empathy that your local customers require!

Content Creation

In February Scott Abel and Rahel Bailie released a book they co-edited, The Language of Content Strategy. Bringing together 52 content experts to define the important terms that content strategists often toss around -- such as content quality assurance, content flow, and transclusion -- and why they are important, Abel and Bailie created a much-needed guide for the industry. As a relative newbie to the field of content strategy this book was a great resource, but this will be valuable to industry veterans as well. Perhaps even more interesting is the story behind the book.

Altova, creator of XMLSpy -- a XML editor -- announced the release of Version 2014 Release 2 of its MissionKit desktop developer tools and server software products. This release provides new functionality to increase performance and efficiency.

Bitrix24 has released a new desktop app for its online collaboration service, adding the ability to synchronize and work with group and company files, as well as including the activity stream and collaboration tools in the app. In addition to sharing, editing, and collaborating on documents with colleagues, the Bitrix24 desktop app makes it possible to send instant messages to co-workers, participate in group chat, make telephone calls, and hold video conferences with other Bitrix24 users.

Advertisers will now be able to produce, distribute, and measure end-to-end social campaigns across the web using a global partnership between marketing technology platform Unruly and eYeka, a crowdsourcing community. The new partnership between video specialists Unruly and crowdsourcing platform eYeka aims to help ROI-driven marketers keep up with the ever-increasing demand to create and distribute content.

The truffle is one of the most prized and expensive items in the culinary world. Genuine black and white truffles can fetch over $3,000 a pound. Famed for their savory, pungent flavor, these elusive fungi are hard to grow and even harder to find. And just like great content, they seem to be accessible to only a few. So is your content the real McCoy? Is it really worth that much more to share genuine stories? Let's take a few lessons from an old man and his dog and see what we can learn about our content from the obscure truffle.

ePublishing, a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) provider of an enterprise publishing system, and Hallmark Data Systems, an audience data and marketing services provider to B-to-B publishers, have initiated a data-level integration.

MadCap Software, Inc., a provider of multi-channel content authoring and a showcase company for Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft XPS, announced that the newest release of MadPak is now available. MadPak is a comprehensive technical authoring suite, featuring six fully integrated, XML-based products for technical communicators.

Engage, developers of web and mobile solutions for enterprises, announced that it has open-sourced its suite of DNN modules. All Engage modules are now available for free to the DNN community, licensed under the MIT open-source license.

We hope that, as loyal readers of EContent, you already know the difference between content strategy and content marketing. But there are some people out there still laboring under the delusion that these two things are one in the same. We have two of the country's leading experts in the subjects here to tell you that they are very different animals, that often work together to achieve similiar goals. Content Wrangler Scott Abel, and the Content Marketing Institute's Robert Rose are here to discuss the finer points of their individual areas of expertise -- and Jose Castillo from thinkjose.com is refereeing! They also discuss Facebook's Paper app, and the future of TLDs.

Find the resources and the tools that inspire you. One might think this is weird but Google Analytics inspires me. It challenges me to think about ways to solve the daily riddles of business. For example, "what page on my website creates the highest conversions, yet sees less than 5% of the traffic." I suddenly feel like Edward Nigma from Batman. Questions such as those keep me up nights.

Mag+ released version 5.0 of its platform for creating mobile applications. All of the changes in Mag+ 5.0 focus on helping clients to engage their users, bolster conversions, and increase sales. The update offers a richer in-app storefront and real-time newsfeed, new marketing tools and more.The most visible change in Mag+ 5.0 is a new interface for its white-label reader app, which includes a more customizable storefront for document and issue management, as well as a full-screen newsfeed window for delivering more frequent content updates.

Content marketing is big business and predicted to get even bigger in the months and years ahead. While "content farms" drove content development for some time, consumers are becoming more discerning and more demanding about the information they consume. Readers have become attuned to and weary of content that amounts to "dreck," says Rachel Parker, founder and CEO of Resonance Content Marketing in Houston. "It's not that audiences are becoming more demanding," she says; "it's that they're on to the practice of buying dreck from content farms, slapping it into a blog post and expecting your audience to thank you for it."

Acrolinx announced version 4.0 of its software that guides writers to create findable, engaging, and understandable content. With this release, Acrolinx enhances its support for technical communicators while expanding its support to marketing writers.

Love motivates us to create things that share that story with the world. And tapping into that desire with your customers forms a bond that will last a lifetime. Do your customers love you? Do they love your products and services? Do they love you enough to post a picture of you, sing a song about you, or write a eulogy for you? The cold, calculating world of business comes down to customer choice between something they love and something they don't. But why is love such a big deal?

Brainshark, Inc., a provider of cloud-based business presentations, announced the availability of new solution packages including the Brainshark Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Learning Cloud. The aim is to help businesses improve the effectiveness of external and internal communications. Brainshark is also unveiling its new Analytics Dashboard, an integral component of these packages. The dashboard provides a visual, single-screen representation of real-time presentation viewing data so individual users and managers can see how their content is performing and take action.

Adobe announced the availability of Adobe Technical Communication Suite 5, the next generation of its single-source authoring and multi-device publishing toolkit for technical writers, help and policy authors, and instructional designers. This latest version aims to streamline the creation of standards-compliant technical content by leveraging XML/DITA authoring with complete Document Type Definition (DTD) support and enables authors to expand the outreach and adoption of their content by seamlessly disseminating it on a range of platforms and in a variety of formats.

Amazon Studios, the original film and series production arm of Amazon.com, announced Amazon Storybuilder. Based on the practice of outlining a screenplay with paper notecards, Amazon Storybuilder takes notecarding and makes it digital, giving screenwriters the ability to lay out digital notecards on a virtual corkboard. Users can access their projects whenever and wherever on their computer, tablet, or smartphone.

The last time you picked a new CMS did you hear this sentence uttered: "I can use that, it's just like Word!" Well, if you picked your CMS based on that usability, somewhere there is a content strategist who is very mad at you. According to Acquia's Tom Wentworth, who spoke in the "How to Make Authors and Content Strategists Happy and Content Creation Efficient" at the Gilbane Conference, content strategists are often at odds with CMS vendors and their users.

Globalization Partners International (GPI), a provider of comprehensive document, software, and website translation services announced that it has launched an ebook translation and desktop publishing service. The new service will allow ebook publishers and companies that have developed ebooks to get them translated and correctly formatted for a variety of ebook formats including ePub and KF8.

MediaFire, an online storage and collaboration provider, announced the launch of the Public Beta of MediaFire Desktop, a free application for OSX and Windows that enables users to instantly upload, collaborate, and share their media in the cloud, directly from their desktop. Designed to complement MediaFire's online storage service, MediaFire Desktop keeps your online and locally stored files safe and in sync.

It used to be really hard to create good content. Twenty-five years ago if you wanted photos of your product it was a chore. As a kid I remember watching the process in my dad's advertising agency in Knoxville, TN. First you needed several thousands of dollars of professional camera equipment and lighting. Then you would gather all the products and shoot endless rolls of film, which you would then ship off to be developed and wait weeks for the actual shots. It was tedious at best and even then you would wind up editing things in a dark room. It would take me hours to resize clip art with a photostat machine that now takes seconds and requires a click and drag with my pointer. In 2013 if you are a major brand and you want a killer photo of your product, it takes one step: Search.

Group SJR's "Unfiltered" report took an in-depth look at a variety of digital media platforms and how consumers respond. The SJR Insights team asked 903 individuals of all ages about their current digital behaviors and gleaned results from their responses. Probably the most relevant results in the report are regarding how Millennials respond to news media through social media channels.

PK4 Media, a performance-based digital media company, announced the launch of XPS, its proprietary cross-platform technology solution that deploys and optimizes display and video creative across online, mobile, and tablet distribution platforms. XPS analyzes targeting data, while optimizing campaigns across any screen to find the most relevant users to engage with the advertiser's brand.

OwnZones announced the opening of its advertising-free platform for premium niche content. It currently hosts more than 80,000 pieces of video, audio and text media, and will continue to expand its libraries to meet the growing demands for niche content. Users can explore via search or through its seventeen curated topic groups at launch.